Sheren, Kelsi

Canadian Forces artillery gunner, Afghanistan veteran, founder of Brass and Unity

Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love

Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 14, 2021

• Kelsi Sheren
• Canadian Forces artillery
• Afghanistan deployment
• IED trauma
• PTSD and military mental health system
• suicidal ideation and recovery
• ayahuasca and Heroic Hearts Project
• cannabis as medication taper
• Brass and Unity
• veteran charities
• Afghanistan withdrawal
• war and dehumanization of the enemy

Core ideas

Sheren recounts joining the Canadian military at a young age with no prior exposure to weapons or hunting, driven partly by a chance conversation with a WWII veteran on a bus and a restless dissatisfaction with her post-high-school life; she was denied infantry due to her small size (about 100 pounds, under five feet) and became an artillery gunner instead, training on the M777 howitzer. She describes the mechanics and culture of artillery work in vivid technical and emotional detail — the choreography required to run a gun crew of five to seven people, the specialized rounds (including the GPS-guided, half-million-dollar Excalibur round reserved for high-value targets), and the visceral, almost symbiotic thrill of firing accurately and hearing "mission accomplished, target hit" — while also noting the concussive physical toll of standing near repeated firing, which she says compounded head trauma from a earlier motocross/rugby-playing childhood and contributes to ongoing memory issues.

Deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 at 19, she describes an atmosphere of dark, coping-oriented military humor alongside genuine danger, and recounts in detail the operation where an IED killed a fellow soldier near her, reducing him to scattered remains she and others had to physically gather under fire — an event she says instantly and permanently altered her psychologically ("my light switch went off"), replacing empathy toward the enemy with a totalizing hatred she now distinguishes from her restored post-war humanity. She describes being administered heavy psychiatric medication with inadequate supervision or peer support immediately afterward, going through a formal debriefing process that emphasized liability over emotional processing, and being isolated from the shared-understanding support of a fixed unit because she was frequently reassigned between groups as one of few women present — all of which she argues actively worsened, rather than treated, her trauma.

She is sharply critical of the Canadian and Afghan-war military systems for treating any admission of psychological struggle as a career-ending liability (discouraging honest disclosure and driving soldiers to hide symptoms), for providing essentially no proactive mental-health training or coping toolkit despite well-understood risk factors for PTSD, and for what she calls a shamefully mishandled and under-resourced 2021 evacuation of Afghan allies, describing her own ad hoc effort — coordinated with off-duty special operations contacts rather than official channels — to extract a high-value Afghan family, and criticizing her government for both the withdrawal's execution and its treatment of wounded veterans. She discusses a wrenching decade-long struggle with suicidal ideation, self-hatred, and major depressive disorder following her return, describing the specific "pros" her mind constructed for suicide (relieving others of the burden of her), and credits her husband, ongoing therapy with a veteran physician, cannabis (used deliberately to taper off multiple pharmaceutical medications), and eventually a supervised ayahuasca retreat through the nonprofit Heroic Hearts Project with a group of special operations veterans as turning points — describing vivid, symbolically charged experiences (being told to "show your teeth" rather than "bite," being shown her deceased first child) that she says gave her tools and renewed motivation to keep pursuing recovery, while stressing that psychedelic experiences require structured integration (debriefing, journaling, professional support) to be useful rather than merely cathartic.

She describes founding Brass and Unity, a jewelry and accessories company (initially self-taught as art therapy) whose profits fund veteran and first-responder mental health and family-support charities (Heroic Hearts Project, Honor House, the All Secure Foundation, and others), framing the company as a practical vehicle for channeling self-interested consumer spending toward causes many people wouldn't otherwise donate to directly, and noting the company adapted during COVID-19 by manufacturing masks to stay financially viable. Throughout, she returns to a recurring theme distinguishing "hate" for a dehumanized wartime enemy from a restored capacity for empathy afterward, argues that combating groups like the Taliban militarily is undermined by cycles of civilian casualties fueling generational recruitment, and suggests that longer-term solutions (citing organizations like Combat Flip Flops that fund girls' literacy in Afghanistan) require investment in education and empowerment rather than force alone. She closes with reflections on love (crediting her husband, whom she was initially unable to emotionally connect with due to post-war numbness, as central to her survival and recovery), on how her relationship to death and fear has changed since her deployment and recovery work, and offers direct advice to young people to avoid work and habits that don't bring genuine fulfillment, to stay physically active, and to build a small circle of people who can have real, caring conversations.

Excerpts